Jesus for Sale

But not everyone appreciated the Humbards' visit. Nearby residents complained about the noise, congestion, and poor sanitation (thanks to a lack of bathroom facilities). They took an instant dislike to the Humbards, dismissing them as little more than hillbilly nonsense.

So did the legendary preacher Dallas Billington, founder of the Akron Baptist Temple. In an Akron Beacon Journal story, Billington threatened to run the family out of town and offered $5,000 to anyone who produced proof of the clan's miraculous healing power. "With one hand, they're going to be rubbing oil on your head with hocus-pocus," Billington said on his weekly radio program, "and with the other, they'll be taking your money out of your pocket."

No one took Billington up on his reward. The Humbards simply responded by leading their followers in a prayer for Billington's soul.

Humbard kept his tent so packed that he extended their original 17-day stay to five weeks. Each time Humbard took the stage, Alma Robinson was in the audience.

She was much like the rest of Humbard's flock. Her parents were homesick southerners who'd moved to Akron to work the city's rubber boom. "My father fell in love with Rex instantly," Robinson says. "There was no one like him. He gave us that old-time, soul-saving gospel preaching that we needed and still need."

As the Humbards prepared to leave, Robinson's parents begged Rex to stay in Akron and start his own church. "Although I was not yet ready to give up traveling with our family's Gospel Big Top, God was building up a powerful attraction between Akron and me, because He had plans for me there," he later wrote.

So Humbard placed the tent in storage and rented the Copley Theater. He and Maude Aimee started doing daily radio broadcasts, which expanded to stations in Pittsburgh and Wheeling. In less than a year, he had outgrown the Copley and moved to the 1,000-seat Ohio Theater, which was renamed Calvary Temple and marked by a 42-foot neon cross.

Then, in the winter of 1953, Humbard had an epiphany.

He watched a crowd of Christmas shoppers gather around O'Neil's department-store window downtown. As they stood in the freezing cold, streetcars rattling loudly behind them, their eyes remained fixed on the flickering television screen. Humbard grasped the medium's power.

"To other people, television is a marvelous invention because it carries big news events, sports, and entertainment," he wrote. "To me, television is a gift from God, given to us so that we can use it to obey His great commandment to go forth into all of the world and preach the gospel."

That's when Humbard gave birth to televangelism.

He soon discovered that getting on television would be no easy task.

Though WAKR accommodated his broadcasts, networks like NBC, CBS, and ABC wanted nothing to do with religious programming for fear of offending their sponsors, who were largely Jewish. Most of the networks had strict policies barring the broadcast of religious services. But Humbard found a loophole.

He got Cleveland's WJW to agree to a weekly gospel-music show featuring Maude Aimee and their children, with Humbard as emcee. As long as he didn't do any preaching, the station didn't have a problem.

For the first few months, Humbard stuck to protocol — until he asked for permission to give a few inspirational talks between songs. The station agreed, but no fire and brimstone.

When letters and calls started pouring in from Humbard's audience, management told Humbard to keep talking.

WJW soon began to air his Sunday services live from Akron. Humbard also started paying stations as far away as Toronto to air his telecasts — a mixture of rootsy song, impassioned sermon, and miraculous healing.

But with each new station came more expenses. Airtime wasn't cheap, and Humbard was beginning to run out of cash. "That was why we started our rallies of television followers," he wrote. "To reap the harvests that had been planted by sowing the seeds of faith on TV."

Humbard and his wife would ask viewers to make donations to keep them on the air. Without their help, God would disappear from His rightful airwaves.